Between Thresholds: On Elsewhere Belonging
INSPIRATION
Belonging is rarely a single “place.” It is a sequence of micro-crossings repeated until they become instinct: threshold after threshold, language after language, public role after private life. This book treats Chinatown not as a backdrop, but as a living interface where those crossings accumulate into identity.
RESEARCH ABSTRACT
This project reads diaspora as something you move through. Chinatown is made of small crossings that repeat until they feel like home: street to shop, counter to kitchen, English to Chinese, public face to private life, old habit to new feed. The book focuses on what those crossings carry, offering not just a narrative line but a lived overlap where continuity and change share the same sidewalk. The challenge is how to show that overlap without turning it into nostalgia, spectacle, or a frozen “community portrait.” The dragon-scale binding lets memory behave as it does in life: partial, layered, revisited. Meaning emerges through the act of reading, through pacing, stacking, and comparison.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
A hand-assembled, inverted dragon-scale artist book that turns diasporic memory into a spatial reading experience. Pages cascade like urban fragments, allowing Chinatown to be read as a folded city where continuity and update coexist.
OPERATION / FLOW / INTERACTION
The binding produces controlled reveal and conceal, so the reader “walks” through the book by unfolding sequences rather than consuming a straight line. Readers can pause mid-cascade, stack moments, and compare layers side by side, creating a self-paced tour of shifting references and repeating thresholds. The interaction rewards rereading, not just viewing.
Exhibition & Collection
